SLU Landscape Days explore more-than-human landscapes

What we mean when we talk about landscape is ever-shifting, perhaps rightly so, but regardless of discipline, it likely connotes a site that is more-than-human, where humans and nonhuman species encounter one another.

This was the theme of a discussion panel for Landscape Days at SLU, featuring Cecilia Åsberg, Professor and Chair of Gender, Nature, Culture and Founder and Director of the Posthumanities Hub at Linköping University, and Michael Palmgren, Operations Manager responsible for marine development at the Marine Education Center Malmö. The panel, moderated by Nina Vogel, brought together two quite different, but resonating, more-than-human approaches to landscape thinking.

Feminist posthumanities as an ethics for living

First, Cecilia Åsberg’s presentation on the feminist posthumanities foregrounded more-than-human approaches as an urgently required ethics, which can guide us not only in our research practices, but also in our ways of being and living. We are perhaps all familiar with a post-Enlightenment version of the humanities, which situates the human (gendered as Man) at the centre of all knowledge production. This default human is the Vitruvian Man, whose white, able, masculine body appears to us as an idealised, and perfectly enclosed and discrete, individual. But this is just one (extremely pervasive) story we can tell about what it is to be human. A feminist posthumanities, on the other hand, begins with an acknowledgement of our more-than-human entanglements. We are never human alone but are rather constituted through and with our relationships with nonhuman species, ecologies and other nonhuman matter, from pollution to food. Right from the very beginning, we are always more-than-human beings.

Beyond gender: feminism as a conceptual toolbox

Feminism, in this posthuman context, Åsberg tells us, is not only a way of thinking about gender, but also a conceptual toolbox for thinking about power, ways of knowing, epistemology and even ontology. The Vitruvian Man of the traditional humanities is a relic that does not sufficiently address today’s complex more-than-human problems. These problems include climate change, species loss and the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al 2015), which are, in fact, manifestations of an interconnected poly-crisis. As such, they require new interdisciplinary modes of research, drawing on diverse bodies of knowledge – insights from, for instance, artists, fishers, farmers, and, wherever possible, nonhuman species need to be held in plurality, even when these bodies of knowledge contradict one another. This is where the feminist posthumanities are particularly adept.

Returning to the implications of the feminist posthumanities for landscape researchers, Åsberg stresses the importance of researching with the understanding that we are never separable from our objects of study. Taking her cue from feminist and STS theorist Donna Haraway, she describes the feminist ethics of situatedness; that is, that we always know from somewhere, from a body located in place and context. To recognise our inescapable entanglement in the landscapes we research, and refuse the logic of separation and scientific distance, is the bedrock of feminist posthumanities knowledge creation. After all, we can never step outside of the world’s entangled problems. 

Ocean literacy and the work of the marine education centre

Next up was a presentation from Michael Palmgren, whose experience as both a diver and as operations manager of the Marine Education Centre in Malmö, has brought him into close relation with the Baltic Sea. But he is quick to observe that none of us are ever separate: “you are also part of the ocean”, he tells us. He describes the work of the Marine Education Centre as helping us to catch up to this fact, by cultivating what he calls “ocean literacy” – that is, how we might ‘read’, know about and understand the ocean we are always and already part of. The Centre teaches children, sometimes as young as preschoolers, but also adults, through intimate, sensory encounters with the ocean. Wetsuits are donned and Palmgren gets everyone into the water, to taste the salt and touch the algae first-hand. 

Building a nature-based reef in Malmö

The pedagogical potential of these kinds of oceanic encounters can be exemplified in a project produced for Bauhaus of the Seas Sails, where Palmgren and others from the Centre, as well as invited participants, produced a nature-based reef in Malmö. The reef was built in a former shipyard basin, dredged to a depth of 30 meters; this loss of shallow coastline during the wharf’s construction also meant a significant loss in blue biodiversity, since these coastal wrack zones are important hosts for many species. This new reef sought to reduce this depth to just four meters, in the hope that it would encourage organisms to return. 

Importantly, Palmgren also invited a number of human participants, including artists and musicians, to act as spokespeople for the nonhuman ocean creatures. Palmgren is one such “Speaker for the Living”: his own voice is for the cod and the flatfish. “So don’t mess with me!” he warns. In their role as representative for a nonhuman, participants wrote notes and added to the rocks in the reef, creating an intimate and personal relationship with the ocean below. The reef project emphasises the need to think about coastal zones in multispecies ways, not only as sites for human development – and happily, it seems to be working: since the reef’s construction, eelgrass (Bandtångssläktet), an important substrate for many other species, has returned. 

“It’s easy to dismiss the eelgrass or algae as unimportant,” Palmgren says, but the importance of its presence is undeniable. Understanding this importance, however, is the task of ocean literacy.

Palmgren is eager for the Malmö municipality to think about the ocean as much as they do about the land. “Malmö is great at talking about trees”, Palmgren says, but we need to start thinking in terms of habitats and relationships. This is why he has also taken the mayor and other municipal politicians out in wetsuits for some of those same first-hand encounters, so they can see the bladderwrack and eelgrass for themselves; they also helped to build the reef as Speakers for the Living. “It can be hard to get the municipality to sit down and talk about eelgrass and stone reefs,” Palmgren says, “but this is why it is important to bring water to the city. This is why we got the mayor to throw stones into the reef – oh this is for the fish! – and it really got him into it!”

Shared ground: post-anthropocentrism and multispecies justice

In their short closing discussion, Åsberg and Palmgren found common ground in their interests in post-anthropocentrism and multispecies justice, despite their different ways of working and points of departure. They stressed the urgency in thinking in more-than-human ways in all facets of life, with multi-level applications. In reference to Anna Tsing, Åsberg noted that “we need arts of living on a damaged planet NOW!” She also appreciatively reiterated Palmgren’s expansive idea of literacy, as incorporating experiential knowledge rather than simply logocentric forms: an environmental literacy is always lived and hands-on.

Concluding Reflections: Practicing a More-Than-Human Ethics

To close, Åsberg left us with an important reminder: that nature is never pure. The concept of nature is instrumentalised and filled with ideology. This is why it is especially important for those of us working with landscape (an idea heavily loaded with nature’s baggage) to practice a code of ethics, remembering that we are always entangled, naturalcultural and more-than-human.